Deaths from infected blood products (FOI)

Request

How many haemophiliacs in Jersey have died of H.I.V and / or Hepatitis C as a result of being given infected blood products in the period 1975 to date.

Response

Health and Community Services recognises the impact that infected blood products given to haemophiliac patients has had on those affected and their families and would like to be able to assist with a response. However, despite efforts to do so, Health and Community Services has determined that it is unable to provide a figure in response to this request for the following reasons.

Due to records held across numerous filing systems and data sets, a manual review of individual records would be required. In the event that patients were identified as having received infected blood products, it is likely that HCS may not have a record of an outcome for the individual if, for example, they had moved off-Island or died outside of the care of Health and Community Services.  It is probable that the medical records of patients have been managed in line with retention schedules and are no longer available.

Consequently, both Article 3 and Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 have been applied as Health and Community Services does not hold data that it considers complete enough to provide a response and it would take longer than 12.5 hours to attempt to provide a figure, which is ultimately unlikely to be reliable.

Information about the Infected Blood Enquiry can be found at Infected Blood Inquiry (org.uk)

Article Applied

Article 3 - Meaning of "information held by a public authority"

For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if –

(a) it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or

(b) it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.